In the manufacture of baked farinaceous products such as bread, it is usual to mould the divided pieces of dough, and in most cases, the dough pieces are then fed into individual baking tins or pans.
A typical moulder/panner as used in a bakery essentially comprises: a moulding head, wherein divided pieces of dough are received and passed through the nip of at least one pair of sheeting rollers so that each dough piece is rolled into sheet form; a coiler wherein each sheet is coiled upon itself into a roll; and a panner where each dough roll is fed into a bread pan before proceeding to the oven.
A well known moulder has three pairs of sheeting rollers and the gap between the rollers of each pair progressively reduces in thickness, so that the dough passing through the rollers is squeezed in three stages, the dough mass being formed into a sheet at the first pair of rollers and then reduced in thickness (and increased in area) at each of the second and third pairs of rollers.
The present invention relates to a dough moulding method, and to apparatus for carrying out the method. Although it is expected that the invention will be applied to dough moulder/panners of the general type to which reference has been made, it is to be understood that it is applicable to any kind of dough moulder in which the dough is caused to pass through one or more pairs of sheeting rollers.
One of the problems associated with dough moulders is that of correct presentation of the divided dough pieces to the sheeting rollers. Moulder/panners usually have a hopper at the input end, and the pieces of dough, which have been roughly shaped into circular form in a previous process, fall into the hopper from a conveyor, and the hopper itself then guides the dough pieces into the nip of the, or the first pair of, nip rollers. Sometimes, a dough piece will be deflected as it falls througgh the hopper and will lie at an angle to the longitudinal axes of the sheeting rollers. When this happens, the sheeting rollers roll the dough into a sheet which is mis-shapen, that is to say, not circular, and as a result, the coiled dough piece presented to the pan is not of the correct shape. It will be appreciated, that one of the objects of dough moulding is that of ensuring that the dough pieces which are fed into the bread pans are of consistent size and shape.
A related problem is that the hopper feed device may not present the dough pieces centrally of the width of the sheeting rollers. If the panner end of the machine is equipped with folding apparatus (such as apparatus adapted to fold the elongate dough piece into a W-formation) that apparatus cannot function properly, if the coiled dough pieces issuing from the machine are not centralised across the width of the machine.
Another problem arises because it is necessary to provide guide plates to convey the dough sheet from one pair of sheeting rollers to the next. The pairs of rollers are usually arranged one above the other, so that the dough sheet falls by gravity from one pair of rollers to the next, but the guide plate is inclined so that it lends support to the dough sheet to prevent collapse of the sheet. There is a tendency for the leading end of a dough sheet to stick to a guide plate, or at least to be excessively retarded by the guide plate, so that the sheet is not properly presented to the next pair of sheeting rollers. This results in the formation of a poor grain or cell structure in the baked product.
Both these problems are accentuated, with modern soft doughs, which contain relatively high quantities of liquids (i.e. water and liqud fats and glucose). This is because the soft tacky nature of the dough tends to cause any part of the dough piece which engages with a surface of the machine to be retarded, so that the dough piece becomes mis-shapen each time it strikes a surface as in falling through a hopper, or sliding over a guide plate. The invention aims at ensuring that the divided dough pieces are presented properly to and pass easily through the sheeting rollers of a dough moulder.